how close do we come to that?
less than sixty-to-the-minus-third-power of the possibility.
! ! ! ! ! !
better creatures than ourselves will follow us. We pick pebbles at a boundless ocean.
what can we do to improve it?
gather our pebbles with serene minds. Gilead paused for a long split second of thought. can psychons be destroyed?
citons may be transferred, psychons are
The connection was suddenly destroyed. "As I was saying," Weems went on quietly, "psychons are as yet beyond our comprehension in many respects. Theory indicates that they may not be destroyed, that thought, like action, is persistent. Whether or not such theory, if true, means that personal identity is also persistent must remain an open question. See the daily papers a few hundred years from now or a few hundred thousand." He stood up.
"I'm anxious to try tomorrow's session, Doc," Gilead-Greene almost bubbled. "Maybe "
"I'm finished with you."
"But, Doctor Weems, that connection was clear as a phone hook-up. Perhaps tomorrow "
"We have established that your talent is erratic. We have no way to train it to dependability. Time is too short to waste, mine and yours." Lapsing suddenly into English, he added, "No."
Gilead left.
During his training in other fields Joe was exposed to many things best described as impressive gadgets. There was an integrating pantograph, a factory-in-abox, which the New Men planned to turn over to ordinary men as soon as the social system was no longer dominated by economic wolves. It could and did reproduce almost any prototype placed on its stage, requiring thereto only materials and power. Its power came from a little nucleonics motor the size of Joe's thumb; its theory played hob with conventional notions of entropy. One put in "sausage"; one got out "pig."
Latent in it was the shape of an economic system as different from the current one as the assemblyline economy differed from the family-shop system and in such a system lay possibilities of human freedom and dignity missing for centuries, if they had ever existed.
In the meantime New Men rarely bought more than one of anything a pattern. Or they made a pattern.
Another useful but hardly wonderful gadget was a dictaphone-typewriter-printing-press combination. The machine's analysers recognized each of the thousand-odd phonetic symbols; there was a typebar for each sound. It produced one or many copies. Much of Gilead's education came from pages printed by this gadget, saving the precious time of others.
The arrangement, classification, and accessibility of knowledge remains in all ages the most pressing problem. With the New Men, complete and organized memory licked most of the problem and rendered record keeping, most reading and writing and most especially the time-destroying trouble of rereading unnecessary. The autoscriber gadget, combined with a "librarian" machine that could "hear" that portion of Speedtalk built into it as a filing system, covered most of the rest of the problem. New Men were not cluttered with endless bits of paper. They never wrote memoranda.
The area under the ranch was crowded with technological wonders, all newer than next week. Incredibly tiny manipulators for micrurgy of all sorts, surgical, chemical, biological manipulation, oddities of cybernetics only less complex than the human brain the list is too long to describe. Joe did not study all of them; an encyclopedic synthesist is concerned with structured shapes of knowledge; he cannot, even with Speedtalk, study details in every field.
Early in his education, when it was clear that he had had the potential to finish the course, plastic surgery was started to give him a new identity and basic appearance. His height was reduced by three inches; his skull was somewhat changed; his complexion was permanently darkened. Gail picked the facial appearance he was given; he did not object. He rather liked it; it seemed to fit his new inner personality.
With a new face, a new brain, and-a new outlook, he was almost in fact a new man. Before he had been a natural genius; now he was a trained genius.
"Joe, how about some riding?"
"Suits."
"I want to give War Conqueror some gentle exercise. He's responding to the saddle; I don't want him to forget."
"Right with you."
Kettle Belly and Gilead-Greene rode out from the ranch buildings. Baldwin let the young horse settle to a walk and began to talk. "I figure you are about ready for work, son." Even in Speedtalk Kettle Belly's speech retained his own flavor.
"I suppose so, but I still have those mental reservations."
"Not sure we are on the side of the angels?"
"I'm sure you mean to be. It's evident that the organization selects for good will and humane intentions quite as carefully as for ability. I wasn't sure at one time "
"Yes?"
"That candidate who came here about six months ago, the one who broke his neck in a riding accident."
"Oh, yes, Very sad."
"Very opportune, you mean. Kettle Belly,"
"Damn it, Joe, if a bad apple gets in this far, we can't let him out." Baldwin reverted to English for swearing purposes; he maintained that it had "more juice,"
"I know it. That's why I'm sure about the quality of our people."
"So it's 'our people' now?"
"Yes. But I'm not sure we are on the right track."
"What's your notion of the right track?"
"We should come out of hiding and teach the ordinary man what he can leam of what we know. He could leam a lot of it and could use it. Properly briefed and trained, he could run his affairs pretty well. He would gladly kick out the no-goods who ride on his shoulders, if only he knew how. We could show him. That would be more to the point than this business of spot assassination, now and then, here and there mind you, I don't object to lolling any man who merits killing; I simply say it's inefficient. No doubt we would have to continue to guard against such crises as the one that brought you and me together, but, in the main, people could run their own affairs if we would just stop pretending that we are so scared we can't mix with people, come out of our hole, and lend a hand."
Baldwin reined up. "Don't say that I don't mix with the common people, Joe; I sell used 'copters for a living. You can t get any commoner. And don't imply that my heart is not with them. We are not like them, but we are tied to them by the strongest bond of all, for we are all, each every one, sickening with the same certainly fetal disease we are alive.
"As for our killings, you don't understand the principles of assassination as a political weapon. Read " He named a Speedtalk library designation. "If I were knocked off, our organization wouldn't even hiccup, 1 but organizations for bad purposes are different. They are personal empires; if you pick the time and the method, you can destroy such an organization by killing one man the parts that remain will be almost harmless until assimilated by another leader then you kill him. It is not inefficient; it's quite efficient, if planned with the brain and not with the emotions.
"As for keeping ourselves separate, we are about like the U-235 in U-238, not effective unless separated out. There have been potential New Men in every generation, but they were spread too thin.
"As for keeping our existence secret, it is utterly necessary if we are to survive and increase. There is nothing so dangerous as being the Chosen People and in the minority. One group was persecuted for two thousand years merely for making the claim."